Paul Yoon Quotes & Sayings

It was summer here and he wondered if there existed a different season for every corner of this world in this moment and the moments to come. Whether if you traveled fast and far enough you could witness a year passing in a single journey. — Paul Yoon

He thought of these years as another life within the one he had. As though it were a thing he was able to carry. A small box. A handkerchief. A stone. — Paul Yoon

It was as though someone, somewhere, were dreaming this and he had crossed into it without permission. Everything both familiar and foreign. — Paul Yoon

One night, returning to the house, he went into his father's shed. He stared at the unsold pots and the vases on the shelves, at their shapes and their designs, the illustrations of landscapes. He wondered what would become of them. He reached for one, then hesitated. He thought of them staying here, untouched, through the seasons and the years. He thought of the ones people had purchased, scattered throughout the country. He imagined that somewhere underneath the glaze and the paint there remained his father's hands. That they contained the heat of a kiln and a home that no longer existed. He wondered whether he would be able to recognize them if he saw them again. — Paul Yoon

Standing there, in his father's shed, he knew that there had been, between them, affection and even tenderness. That his father had never been unkind. That in their silences there had been a form of love. But he had never known him, had never been close to him in the way he witnessed other sons and their fathers. — Paul Yoon

This momentary bridge. The wonder of a shared memory, returned. Of a place once theirs and a life that had already been lived. — Paul Yoon

But as he grew older he thought less of it, grew accustomed to the days lived. Each day he climbed the hill, as he used to, and helped build the factory. He visited the town. The seasons passed. Then the years. His father a curtained room. His mother, too. This blank space in his life that he was unable to paint. — Paul Yoon

He imagined the tailor as a young man and his journey here, crossing an ocean on a slow-moving ship as he himself did. He wondered whether Kiyoshi had been wearing a uniform. Whether there had been a family and where they were. What the man had fled from, if he had fled at all. What the man had let go of and whether it was possible to regain anything, to search and find it once more. Whether there was someone far from here who remembered him. — Paul Yoon

For a moment, he was still that man, a boy, in that country, in that harbor, with his back to the years that had happened and unsure of whether those years would follow him into the sea. — Paul Yoon

And yet he found comfort in the absence of telling. — Paul Yoon

He thought of these yers as another life within the one he had. As though it were a thing he was able to carry. A small box. A handkerchief. A stone. He did not understand how a life could vanish. How that was even possible. How it could close in an instant before you even reach inside one last time, touch someone's hand one last time. How there would come a day when no one would wonder about the life he had before this one. — Paul Yoon

One time the scent of the old man appeared in the air: some combination of tobacco and citrus and soap. It was fleeting yet he was certain he had smelled it, but he did not know where it had come from, whether it had been someone at the window or from the shop itself, as though a part of the man remained in the tables, in the air of the boxes, in the fabrics themselves. — Paul Yoon